Ubaldo Jimenez, watching the Home Run Derby on Monday at Angel Stadium in Anaheim, Calif., needs only three wins to break the Rockies’ record for victories in a season. Off to a 15-1 start, he will be the NL’s starting pitcher tonight in the All-Star Game. “This is something that you dream about,” he said.

Like a 98-mph fastball from Ubaldo Jimenez, this was hard to see coming. A pitcher from Colorado starting the All-Star Game is a bigger upset than the Rockies playing in the World Series.

When Jimenez unleashes the heat from his right arm at New York Yankees hitter Derek Jeter on a night all the stars come out, it will be the single most important event since the Rockies began playing baseball.

Why?

Anything is possible now.

With all due respect to the unforgettable magic of Rocktober, a Most Valuable Player award won by Larry Walker and the roar of 80,000 fans when Eric Young punctuated the first opening day in Colorado with a home run, Jimenez has meant more to Denver gaining respect as a baseball town than anything we have seen before him.

From the time the Rockies inflated cowhide with helium and started launching homers to the stratosphere back in 1993, maybe dreamers envisioned how the National League franchise could someday win a championship. But who would have ever imagined a Colorado pitcher earning a 15-1 record, a 2.20 earned-run average and comparisons to Hall of Famer Bob Gibson?

Not Jimenez.

“When I was coming up with the Rockies, I remember the games always being 12-10 and 15-14, so you never thought anything like this was possible,” Jimenez said Monday, 24 hours before he was to be introduced as the National League’s ace pitcher and take the mound at the All-Star Game. “I don’t really think about my stats or what it means. But it’s an honor to be representing my team.”

Who thinks baseball in the Rocky Mountains is a joke now?

No longer do hitters arrive in Denver and crack wise about Coors Canaveral. They are too busy mumbling to themselves while dragging a bat to the dugout after another strikeout by Jimenez.

The Coors Field humidor, a device that returned sanity to baseball played at 5,280 feet above sea level, might well be the second-best thing that has ever happened to pitching in Denver.

Jimenez is No. 1 with a bullet that is his four-seam fastball.

While the crush that Colorado baseball fans developed on the local boys of summer began with Andres Galarraga, blossomed through the prime of Todd Helton and still beats strong with adulation for Troy Tulowitzki, no player wearing a Rockies uniform has inspired the applause from coast to coast that other Denver sports figures from John Elway to Carmelo Anthony have heard.

The All-Star Game might not be little more than a glorified exhibition, but a lot is riding on every pitch from Jimenez. This night could be the coming-out party for the first genuinely big-time baseball star in Denver history.

Although so quiet he is often called “Chief” in a playful reference by Rockies manager Jim Tracy to a famously silent movie character from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” the immense talent of Jimenez can speak directly to the heart of young fans from Alabama to Alaska looking to adopt their first major-league hero.

The Blake Street Bombers were more fun to watch than fireworks on the Fourth of July but never made any real noise in the playoffs.

The rollicking good times of Rocktober 2007 ended in the gutter, swept to the curb in four games by Boston and all those obnoxious Red Sox supporters who acted like a young franchise in Colorado was not worthy of winning a World Series.

When slugger Matt Holliday wanted to get paid, the Rockies unloaded him, giving the impression Denver serves as a farm team for powerful franchises that think and spend big.

Every time a Jimenez fastball threatens to break 100 on the radar gun, however, this 26-year-old pitcher demonstrates the power to change all we thought was true about baseball in the Rockies.

The secret of how Denver could finally become a baseball town to be taken seriously might be found in the right arm of Jimenez.